The Bifurcation of Racial Justice Discourse - Incite at Columbia University
Incubated Project
The Bifurcation of Racial Justice Discourse
- Funding Program The Breakdown/ (Re)generation Project
- Affiliated Center Data Science Institute The Institute for Research in African-American Studies
- Affiliated Departments Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies Barnard College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Psychology
- Project Lead Colin Leach
Colin Leach is leading a multi-disciplinary team that works in a trans-disciplinary way to better understand how Black Lives Matter—the meme and the movement—moves people for, against, and away from racial justice in the U.S. and U.K.
The team, including Shaunette T. Ferguson and Nikhi Anand is examining the unprecedented use of Black Lives Matter (labels and content) for online discussion of racial justice in the summer of 2020 (after the murder of George Floyd) in comparison to previous time periods.
With support from Incite, Leach's team is adopting a systematic approach to evaluate the schismogenesis—a phenomenon where discourse bifurcates into polarized communities—by investigating peaks in online discussions using large datasets, including Freelon et al.'s and Giorgi et al.'s Twitter Corpus, along with the ACLED dataset for U.S. protests. This research aims to identify intervention strategies for promoting constructive discussions and shared commitments to racial equality.More Projects
-
go to Hidden Justice: An Ethnographic Examination of U.S. Immigration Courts
Hidden Justice: An Ethnographic Examination of U.S. Immigration CourtsThrough the Immigration Research Hub, undergraduate students at Columbia, Princeton, and California State University–Long Beach are trained to observe courtroom dynamics of immigration courts firsthand. Part of the Hard Questions Grant -
go to Documenting the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement
Documenting the Israeli Democracy Protest MovementCapturing the untold stories of Israel's largest grassroots protest movement through intimate interviews with twenty leading organizers. Part of the Left Field Fund
-
go to The Social Study of Disappearance
The Social Study of DisappearanceConducting a comparative study of forced disappearance. Part of the Breakdown/ (Re)generation Project
-
go to Whole Earth Redux
Whole Earth ReduxA print publication featuring essays and short stories that take an object from the iconic Whole Earth Catalog and excavate its deeper histories. Part of the Left Field Fund